Determine the difficulty of an english word

Question

I am working a word based game. My word database contains around 10,000 english words (sorted alphabetically). I am planning to have 5 difficulty levels in the game. Level 1

Answer 1

In addition to metrics such as Flesch-Kincaid, you could try an approach based on the Dale-Chall readability formula, using lists of words that are familiar to readers of a particular level of ability.

Implementations of many of the readability formulae contain code for estimating the number of syllables in a word, which may also be useful.